: Richard Thurnwald
: Bernhard J. Schmidt
: Economics in Primitive Communities Extract of essential statements
: Books on Demand
: 9783755741350
: 1
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: Soziologie
: English
: 68
: DRM
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ECONOMICS IN PRIMITIVE COMMUNITIES By RICHARD THURNWALD, Professor of Ethnology and Sociology in the University of Berlin OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 1932 Authors who, from today's perspective and in the face of current research, were far ahead of their time were often misunderstood or simply ignored by their contemporaries. And even if an excerpt from an extensive work is always subjective, it still offers a middle ground between subsuming under a catchphrase on the one hand, and intensive preoccupation with the author and his work on the other. If you want to deal intensively with the work, please refer to www.archive.org, where the full version is available for free.

He was born 18 September 1869 in Vienna, and died 19 January 1954 (aged 84) in Berlin. Thurnwald was an Austrian anthropologist

Economics in Primitive Communities


INTRODUCTION


§ 1. In discussions on the economics of primitive society the problem of food-supply has until recently been the only one taken into account. Furthermore, thought in the last century was dominated by the theories of Darwin and Spencer, which tended to conceive cultural development along one line only. Consequently, we find economics treated from the same point of view, and this led to the theory of ‘the three stages’, by which all primitive economic development was traced through evolution from hunting to pastoral life and thence to agriculture. This has lasted until the present day.
§ 2. It is unquestionable that the provision of food is of greater importance and demands a larger percentage of energy in the economic field among primitive communities than in our own. But the science of economics is not confined to the providing of food. Of what then does it consist ?
The devouring of newly killed beasts and the eating of freshly picked fruits and roots, pulled from the soil, certainly cannot be called economics. More than this is implied in the term.
If there ever was a time when man, or his ancestor, lived from moment to moment on what he killed or caught, it was a time without economics.
Economics is concerned not merely with the direction of the instincts, with the plans and calculations of the individual: it is a social affair, dealing with different men as parts of a piece of interlocking machinery. The economics of the community practically consist of the economics of individual households.
The traditional hunting-grounds, the cultivated soil, and, among pastoral people, the pasture lands are similarly defended by mutual agree ment and co-operation.
A characteristic feature of primitive economics is the absence of any desire to make profits either from produption or exchange. If money exists at all, its function is quite different from that fulfilled by it in our civilization. It never ceases 'to be concrete material, and it never becomes' an entirely abstract representation of value.
Consequently economic transactions refer more to the quality and kind of the real articles than to abstract values. The ambition of individuals, therefore, is not directed towards the acquisition of wealth, but is more interested in the kind of the work.
The whole theoretical system, however, may be completely altered by certain personal factors, if these happen to suit the exigencies of the moment. The importance of such alterations must not be under-estimated in the lives of the natives, since they are the germs of change in customs and institutions. We are accustomed to overlook them because we usually deal with onl